Remembering The 'Edutainer' Who Made Statistics Come To LifeHe called himself an "edutainer." His gift was bringing statistics about the world to life. Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin remembers Swedish statistician Hans Rosling, who died this week.

He called himself an "edutainer." His gift was bringing statistics about the world to life. Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin remembers Swedish statistician Hans Rosling, who died this week.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Hans Rosling called himself an edutainer (ph). He was a Swedish doctor and health statistician who died this week at the age of 68. He had an enthusiasm for numbers and knew how to translate them into a bouncing, morphing graphics that made statistics come alive.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

HANS ROSLING: Here come all the countries - Europe, brown; Asia, red; Middle East, green; Africa, south of Sahara (ph), blue; and the Americas, yellow. And the size of the country bubble show the size of the population. And in 1810, it was pretty crowded down there, wasn't it?

SIMON: Our math guy Keith Devlin joins us from Stanford University. Thanks very much for being with us, professor.

KEITH DEVLIN: Oh, thanks for having me on again, Scott.

SIMON: You liked Hans Rosling a lot.

DEVLIN: I did indeed. I've never met him, but I just knew him through his many YouTube videos, and they were absolute dynamite. I saw the first one when he did - I think it was his first one - in 2006, a TED Talk. And for the first time in my life, I thought here's someone who can take statistics that most people regard as dull and boring and bring it alive. In fact, from that little clip, it's like a commentary on a football game. You know, it's like a Super Bowl commentary.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

ROSLING: Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get larger families, but they - no - a longer life but not larger families. The Africans are the green down here. They still remain here. This is India. Indonesia is moving on pretty fast.

DEVLIN: We've had pie charts. We've had bubble charts. We've had graphs for years and years and years. And people sort of look at them and then they yawn. But when you animate those and you show what's been happening over a period of 20, 30 or 40, 50 years, your view of the world is completely upended. We realize that most of the assumptions we carry around with us about the world are completely wrong.

SIMON: Such as?

DEVLIN: So we tend to think things haven't been getting much better. In fact, we tend to think things have been getting much worse. In fact, over the last 50 years, almost everything in the world on a global scale has got better. And the way that Hans did this - it was very good. He was indeed a sort of an edutainer. He typically would go into the room, and he would ask the audience questions. Often they had to answer them with clickers or raising their hands or something. One that he asks that I particularly like - he would go in and he'd say, what percentage of the world's 1-year-old children are vaccinated against measles? Is it A, 20 percent; B, 50 percent; or C, 80 percent?

Now, most of us from the affluent Western countries will think, well, maybe 20 percent, maybe 50 percent. The answer is C. It's 80 percent of the world's 1-year-old children have been vaccinated against measles. We get it wrong because 50 years ago that wasn't the case and because we haven't had these graphics we don't realize that over the last 30, 40, 50 years things have changed dramatically. And you see how the world has been getting a better, safer, more homogeneous place. It just has.

SIMON: That doesn't mean, of course, that poverty is even - is any less pernicious for the hundreds of millions of people who have to...

DEVLIN: No, no, and in fact, you know, some of the - some of the justifiable critiques has been by - been so successful in telling this story, you know, there's a danger of saying, oh, well, you know, we don't need to worry about this because that's absolutely not the case. What Rosling is doing is showing us an overall global trend, which in a sense tells us how bad things were - doesn't mean to say the problems are gone, doesn't mean to say they're any less. And in fact, when you try to use his data to predict the future, all sorts of problems arise. But what it does do is say, hey, just catch your breath a minute and see what's really been going on. We do have reason to feel good about the fact we've made progress.

SIMON: Keith Devlin, our friend the math guy from Stanford, thanks so much for being with us.

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'Edutainer' Hans Rosling, Who Taught Us About The World, Has Died

Hans Rosling gives a presentation on global population at a conference in Oxford, England, in 2012.
Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for ReSource 2012/Getty Images
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Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for ReSource 2012/Getty Images

Hans Rosling gives a presentation on global population at a conference in Oxford, England, in 2012.

Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for ReSource 2012/Getty Images

He called himself an "edutainer."

He had a knack for explaining difficult concepts — global inequality, climate change, disease and poverty. He used maps, humor and props like storage boxes and colored stones to tell the story of our world and to advocate for the poor: "Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health."

Hans Rosling, the medical doctor,professor of international health and statistician who found joy in hard facts, died on Tuesday from pancreatic cancer in Uppsala, Sweden, surrounded by family. He was 68.

Rosling had a colorful way of teaching. "I can show you! Let me show you the world," he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013, using stacks of Lego-like bricks to show the narrowing gap between the world's rich and poor.

I had the privilege of seeing Rosling in person at a conference in Dar es Salaam in 2013. He gave an abridged version of the famous TED Talk he gave in 2006, which painted a positive view of development. He showed us that life is getting better for more people, if we only bothered to look at the numbers.

"Data is often better than you think," he said in that TED Talk.

In front of his PowerPoint presentation projected on the wall, he jumped and pointed from data point to data point, excited and breathless, like a tornado.

His enthusiasm was infectious. The room was filled with global health bureaucrats and government workers who had probably seen it all — but he had captured their attention completely. And mine, too.

Rosling, the co-founder of the Gapminder Institute, a global development "fact tank" in Sweden, definitely made statistics entertaining — but above all, he educated the world about itself.Here's a collection of some of his most popular video presentations.

The best stats you've ever seen

200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes

YouTube

Global population growth, box by box

YouTube

Where are the Syrian refugees?

YouTube

Why did Ebola spread in West Africa?

YouTube

Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine

YouTube

What's your favorite Hans Rosling video? Share with us on Twitter at @NPRGoatsandSoda.